Thursday, December 29, 2011

I am at about the midpoint of my holiday vacation (my office is closed through New Years) and this is the first chance I have had to sit down. Been super busy doing the holiday thing -- visiting people, eating, shopping in over crowded germy shopping malls until i swear never to set a foot back inside ever again but then come back a day later.. you know. That thing.

The days I WAS at home all day, i spent in the kitchen. Because it's December and that's what i do! I bake yummy things that are full of calories and then eat them myself, feel guilty for the gluttony and decide to share with my friends. If they are all squishy and fluffy then i won't look too bad next to them, right?

So when i say batches, there were at least 2 if not 3 dozen cookies per batch. In total there were 18 dozen cookies, more than 216.

A new cookie made it into packages this year. White Chocolate Gingerbread. Next time two small tweaks; less chips, no sugar coating. But still good and somewhat different.

Maybe a new cookie will show up each year. This year i want to mention that there are two important things to note. The first is that there are no nuts in any of the cookies. That's because i accidently walnutted my allergic friend this past summer and I hope to never do that again. The second is that although this took a combined 9 hours ( over two days and 200 Christmas songs) and it was long and tedious it went 100 TIMES BETTER WITH MY MAGIC MIXER. Awesome investment.

My personal favorite is the chocolate chocolate chip one, in case you were wondering.

Funny story though, my last batch were the peanut butter cookies. It was a long day, so i was excited to be done with it all. Which only made the little kitchen disaster that much more devastating I was cracking the second egg into the batter and my hand slipped and i put the whole egg into the mixer. The whole egg with the shell. Oy. >.< Had to start over again!

My favorite part i think is boxing them up. And slapping on the labels. It's like I am my very own production line. Production like of Yum....

The other part to his present was hot cocoa. I found this recipe on the Internets and figured that the only thing better than giving people diabetes, would be to give people cookies AND hot cocoa. Super rich, chocolatey hot cocoa. And so i did just that.

This stuff actually has white chocolate chips food processed into oblivion in the mix. That's what makes it so creamy. (And what makes the "Calories: Made with love, there are none" line a bold faced lie.) I misjudged how many white chocolate chips i would actually NEED though. So i have a good 3-4 cupcakes in the cabinet. I'm sure those will be put to good use. I have had way too many requests to remake my blackberry cupcakes.

I made about 40 servings of this stuff to give out. Okay 39. I kept one for myself. I have to try everything once myself right? That's how i learned that you need to use twice the amount of milk then what the directions call for.

I had some cookie bags that matched the hot cocoa bags. I liked the bright colors. Good job Target.

But mostly it was a mix match of treat boxes. Oh Christmas joy! I've given out about half of the cookies so far, but i have a lot of people that i have not been able to see yet. I am a little bit worried that i will end up with too many left over cookies and have to start eating them all myself.

And that won't be a good idea, seeing as I have eaten ALL THE THINGS these past few weeks. So not quite sure if i will get to bake anything else before the end of the year. Not because of time, or lack of ideas but because I DON'T WANT SWEETS NEAR ME RIGHT NOW. >.< I promised red velvet for a friend but i just dont know if i have it in me!

On a related note though, i got so many cute cupcake things for my birthday and Christmas this year so there will be LOTS of new posts in the new year as i start to use them all. I shall try to post about them this week, but if not expect me in the new year!

Monday, December 12, 2011

IT WAS A MASSACRE. THERE WERE PENGUIN PARTS EVERYWHERE. I WAS SAWING THROUGH THEIR WINGS. Oh the humanity.

Okay maybe it wasn't EXACTLY like that, but that's what it felt like on Sunday morning as i tried to quickly (I was about 1.5 hrs late to my dinner party, lalala) assemble my Oreo penguins on top of my cookies and cream cupcakes. Penguin body (face?) parts all over the place.

I actually made a list a few months ago of cupcakes I wanted to try to bake and I have baked almost all of them! The only one missing is those darn tres leches cupcakes i never find time to make. What I was able to scratch off the list this weekend were Oreo Cookies and Cream Cupcakes. I'm not sure why i wanted to try and make them since i don't actually even like Oreos that much ... however i saw a link on Cupcakes Take the Cake last month for these ADORABLE cupcakes that called for Oreo penguins as decoration. Which meant i had to take it up a notch, of course. And lose the coconut. Cuz i don't like coconut flakes.

To be exact my cupcakes had an oreo crumble crust, a vanilla cake, a cookies and cream frosting filling, a marshmallow fluff frosting top and were decorated for the holidays penguin style.

I spent about a week looking up recipes and studying how different bakers/bloggers constructed their cookies and cream cupcakes. In the end i decided to make mine a little like my smores cupcakes and to bust out my corer. God, how I love that little green thing.

I adapted this recipe from here. I ended up changing it because i did not have real vanilla beans. And so that kind of changed the order of how i had to bake things... so it ended up being a bit watery. I mean it was still good, but i kind of wished i had chosen another recipe -- or at least been able to follow it step by step. So i won't post what i did here. Next time, ill have some changes for sure. They baked up a little like hills LOL. >.< oops? Still edible and yummy though.

Once your vanilla cupcakes are out of the oven and they have had time to cool it is time to core the suckers. I love doing it. Save the tops though! You need to be able to cover the holes.

And i am not going to tell you whether or not i ate the rest of the middles or i threw them away. Either answer is a bit deplorable.

Cream butter, cream cheese and whipping cream together. Add the vanilla, and then the powdered sugar. Beat until fluffy. Then comes the fun part. Throw in the crushed oreos. It looks like this. Haha. It's like dirt.

Just fold them in carefully and evenly and you are good to go. I threw them in a ziplock and snipped the edge so that i could pipe them in. No tip required.

These cupcakes were just busting out with oreo goodness, weren't they? And i might have spilled powdered sugar everywhere at one point. Oops. (Don't forget to cover them with the tops of the cored centers again!)

Beat butter and marshmallow fluff. Add powdered sugar. Add whipping cream IF necessary. It's SUPER effing cold in my house right now, so i had to use whipping cream in both my frostings to get them to do anything. Even if i leave out the butter and eggs for hours, things are still not "room temp". They're cold as penguins. The whipping cream helped to make both fluffier.

Now there is an easy way to finish these cupcakes. And that is to garnish them with an oreo on top.Cute huh?

Two seconds, easy peasy and call it a day. Looks adorable with my black and white spotted liners.

And that's totally what i did with the last eight. But first i had to struggle with making 12 penguins. And by struggle i just mean it took me longer than i thought it would. And i was late. And hadn't showered, and i wasn't dressed and i hadn't worked out. AND worst of all, i had forgotten to buy heart sprinkles like i had wanted to. I had wanted to make some girls too :(

* Normal people will need one oreo cookie per penguin they make. People like me need a whole freaking package for this endeavor. Okay fine, two packages total. Actually i suggest you try and do this part first. Because the things you mess up you can use for your crumbs. I ended up throwing away a lot of Oreo parts instead because every time i touched an Oreo it would just CRUMBLE in my hands. I BROKE SO MANY WINGS. Stupid cookies.

One of the hardest part was twisting that cookie and having the cream stay on only one side. It took forever. Most because it takes more thank skill. It takes coordination. Finesse. Steady hands. I have none of those. But i got it done.

But guess what? The cookies aren't that clean. You still get left with some chocolate on the cream. So i tried to fix that a little by putting a dollop of the marshmallow fluff frosting over the cream and spreading it out in order to hide as many imperfections as possible.

Then i added the eyes. Not 100% white but it certainly helped i think. The eyes (by Wilton) you can find at Target, Wal-Mart, Michaels, etc. They're a little pricey but i am glad i did not have to worry about making eyes from scratch.

Next were the beaks. Funny story about the beaks. When i finally made it to my dinner party and someone asked me what the beaks were my response was a somewhat frazzled "mother effing Starbursts!". This was because I was mentally transported back to kitchen - frantically microwaving Starbursts and smashing them into pliable strips that were not too hot or too cold while trying to text message "IM SORRY IM GOING TO BE SO LATE, I HAVE A FLOCK OF FACELESS PENGUINS TO CONTEND WITH OKAY????"

As illustrated in the picture below, you take an orange starburst (left) and put it in the microwave for 15 seconds. Then when its warm with super clean hands and a rolling pin you flatten it out so you can cut it with a knife. The middle picture is what a cut strip looks like. You cut a triangle (right) and use that as a beak. And you do this SUPER fast before it gets too hard.

That ladies and gentleman, is why its a mother effing starburst of a nose.

Lastly, your penguin needs wings. This is where most of the massacre happened i admit. Okay maybe i broke a few faces. But mostly it was their wings. Have you ever TRIED to cut an oreo with a knife before?

They break in 45 ways. About 45 times. And then maybe you get ONE wing. As you can see i have a large pile of broken cookies on my (side note: isnt it so CUTE?) apple cutting board. Try to cut them in half, and then cut off about the top 1/3 of one half. That's a good size for wings.

It was an ordeal. And then, THEN i was ready to make my penguins have a photoshoot.

Yes. I made my cupcakes have a photoshoot. Yes, i was late and unbathed and squishy but i still made them have a photoshoot. (If there were some notabley female penguins in this photoshoot it would have made me uber happy though... I like to imagine that the white liners were the girls, the black ones the boys though.)

And yes, i found the only holiday tissue we had laying around and I made them have a background.

I mean come ON, they kinda deserved to be in the snow right? RIGHT? They appreciated the camera in their face i think. In fact, i seem to detect somewhat of a vain strut in their silent existence, don't you think?

Anyways, once I was done stroking their little penguin egos, i packed them up and went to my dinner. When dessert rolled around i snapped a picture of the dissected cupcake for you guys.

Okay I am lying. I dissected my friend's cupcake with the intent to give it back to her for her to eat. What ended up happening however was that i dissected it. photographed it, put it back together, stared at it for a second and told her to get another one because i was eating it. And so i did. Everything except the Oreo face because what kind of monster would eat an oreo penguin face???

Bonus story: I have a good friend who upon entering my phone number into his cell phone quite some years ago, typed in "Anna Penguin Face" because he didn't know my last name and because I genuinely like penguins. And that's they way it reamined, said friend not entirely sure of my real last name for quite a few years.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Sometimes i have to sketch things out/write them down to figure out how I am going to do things. I like to stay i am organized. Others might like to say that i am neurotic. Those who say the latter will not get any of these.

xoxo,
Anna

P.S. There are no cupcakes in Costa Rica. But i ate my weight in sweet plantains, so i am not complaining.